Late is good

While Prime Minister Narendra Modi might be leaving no stone unturned to ensure ministers and government officials turn up for work on time, being late has its advantages, as officials working at Kolkata's New Secretariat building found out recently. When a fire broke out in a section of the seventh floor, hundreds of officials who work in the building escaped unhurt because they simply hadn't turned up. While the official time to start work in a state government office is 10 a m, according to some estimates, less than 10 per cent of the 3,500-odd employees who work in the 13-storey building were present when the fire broke out in the office of Subrata Mukherjee, who is the minister for panchayat and rural development and public health engineering in the state.